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HyperList

Everything. Concise and precise.

HyperListS represents a way to describe anything – any state or any transition. It represents data in tree-structure lists with a very rich set of features. It can be used for any structuring of data, such as:

Todo lists

Project plans

Data structures

Business processes

Logic breakdowns

Food recipes

Outlines of ideas

. . . and much, much more

If you came to this page to get a quick primer on HyperList, here you go:

HyperList contains Items (separate particulars, usually on a single line)

An Item can have a “child”, adding description or depth to its parent Item

A “child” is an indented Item under its parent Item

A semicolon (“;”) can be used instead of a line break to separate Items

Top level Items are in bold for clarity

An Item can contain various elements, color coded for
clarity

Square brackets indicate a condition or “Qualifier” for the Item (in green)

A single question mark enclosed in square brackets denotes an optional item

A word in capital letters ending in a colon at the beginning of an Item is called an Operator (in blue)

An Operator “operates” on that Item

If a line ends in an Operator, it “operates” on all the Item’s children

Words not in capitals at the beginning of an Item and ending in a colon are a Tag (in red)

Tags give structure information to an Item. If a line ends in a Tag, it applies to all the Item’s children.

A hash mark (“#”) indicates a Reference (in purple)

A Reference in a process means that you jump to where the Reference points

The HyperList document starts off with several examples where lists are useful as a way of describing something and where HyperLists is especially powerful. It then goes into every part of HyperLists and how it can be used to describe anything (yes – anything). Toward the end, HyperLists is used in describing itself, something very few frameworks are able to accomplish.

“The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order – not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists [. . . ]” (Umberto Eco)

HyperGraph

You can automatically graph a HyperList as either a mindmap (for HyperLists that are State descriptions) or a flowchart (for HyperLists that are Transitions descriptions). An example should suffice – this dummy HyperList:

HyperGraph is a Ruby script with a lot of options (run “hypergraph -h” for a full overview). Download HyperGraph here. HyperGraph is a rather complex endeavour. It works but you may encounter some snags. If you do, drop me a line and I will fix.

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